Introduction

In spirit of the conversation happening today earlier, I'll give some motivation. In general there is a disconnect between academic researchers and people who work in open-source software. It's a pity because these two groups are interested in bitcoin, they love difficult questions and working on them, and somehow it seems like the choice of questions and spirit of work is sometimes not aligned to the best of bitcoin.

There is an effort at Chaincode to start bridging this gap. A general background is that we have a research seminar, and there will be a research prize specifically for peer-reviewed in journal papers to try to reach out to academics about things that they are interested in. There's a lot of people working on things to work on and they don't know what the options are out there. There are people that really want to do meaningful that would have an effect. They go around and find something and create a model and then nothing makes sense and everybody ignores it. Then they get disinterested and move on.

Steps

In general when it comes to getting problems from this community... there are three steps: collecting, curation and distribution. There is openbitcoinproblems.org where you can add some items. I just threw up a Google Doc. This document can help us contact you if we don't understand the research topic. I just think it's something that can be done by walking around and asking what would be nice to solve.

Often they want a problem that is both approachable and meaningful. Not everything that we write down and people would bring up has the same kind of impact. Curation is something that could kind of happen on a personal level. I have some problems that I care about more than others. Starting from a list.

Idea collection

This is an open call for the raw list of ideas that you would like people to work on.

https://bitcoinproblems.org/